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Comment by Epenthesis | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that's true.

I have little to no sex drive (am "asexual" as the kids say), but I've had intense crushes/obsessive feelings about individuals with no associated desire to have sex with the targets thereof.

I imagine that for people with normal sex drives, both components play a role in initial relationship formation; ie, there's an emotional component in addition to "lust" as conventionally defined.

You could quibble that these (relatively short lived) intense emotions are "lust", as opposed to the "love" of a longer relationship, but that seems to be playing a semantic game that doesn't really concord with how we generally use those words.

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Lust may be the wrong word here. Infatuation is more like the term I tend to associate with people's initial attraction and substance of their relationship with someone else. The simple reason has more to do with the fact people simply CANNOT truly know each other, their values, and the result of their behaviors and choices, until enough time passes.

It is also worth mentioning that people's lives arc on their own, in that they change. Preferences change. Values might even shift for some people over time (e.g. a religious person becoming totally secular or even atheistic later in life). And those changes also do not typically emerge in a couple of months of dating and flirting with one another.

It's.... just human nature.

That's called limerence, not love.

That's the word some psychologist coined. It's pretty absurd to me to take such a common part of the human experience and use a neologism for it, when it's something that has been experienced for thousands of years the world over, and has received common words - love at first sight, infatuation, lust, depending on exact details.

Ok, call it infatuation if you want, but it's still not commonly called love. But limerence sounds like it is like infatuation on steroids.

Psychologists have simply got better at classifying emotions, what you've decided to dismissingly call 'coined'.

The original response being disputed was that people initially fall in lust rather than love. Infatuation and lust seem like different things to me

>Psychologists have simply got better at classifying emotions

This being Hacker News, I am really not supposed to lay into the statement with all the derision and vitriol that it legitimately deserves. I'll restrain myself.

One critique of psychology is practitioners use fancy sounding words- ideally with latin rootes- to make unscientific claims seem scientific.

I believe I read that critique from a psychologist.

There are edge cases to anything in biology. I would say you are an edge case. Love and sex are fundamental to humanity and our continued existence. You being a 0.001% outlier, who will likely not produce any offspring who would have a chance to inherit your asexual-ness, does not refute the parent comment whatsoever.

Love and sex are two different things. There's a reason we have two separate words, not just one.

And, people can love their parents, children, and siblings. Does not mean they want to have sex with them.

What little research that has been done on asexuality puts us at closer to 1%.

I'm certainly an outlier, but it seems intuitively likely that I'm experiencing a subset of what other people experience, rather than a disjoint. Ie, other people feel the socio-emotional component as well as the lust component, with me lacking the latter.

However, it might be difficult for most people to orthogonalize these two components, since for them they occur simultaneously. That's the relevance of my asexuality to my comment: I suspect it allows me to experience the socio-emotional component without also experiencing the lust component, and thereby more easily see them as different.

If it's true that there's both a lust and socio-emotional component, it still seems inaccurate (or at least, idiosyncratic) to refer to the combination of the two as "lust".

I appreciate this perspective. I also appreciate that you responded to a comment that could have been construed as dismissive or personally attacking without a hint of defensiveness or enmity. HN often surprises me.

Data point: I'm definitely not asexual, but I do experience romantic feelings and sexual feelings separately: I feel one, the other, or both towards various people. (A situation that satisfies one drive is likely to inflame the other, but initially they are often distinct.)

Just because people have questioned the word "love" and stuff: when I say "romantic feelings" above, I mean this type of thing: "I find myself idly thinking about her, and that this tends to make me blush; when near her, or imagining it, I'm hyper-focused on her presence (primarily her face), such that if she moves slightly closer, it's as if I feel it on my cheek; my desires are to look at her, smile at her, tell her about my feelings, and touch her affectionately." Upon touching her (or imagining doing so), I would tend to notice her body and, as I say, that is likely to inflame sexual desire; but often not before then.

I've asked around. I've met some guys who said they were similarly separate drives, and others who said they always coincided. I think girls tended to say they were separate as well. I don't have too many or too certain data points, though.

Please don't devalue and dehumanize your opponent and their contribution by calling them an edge case and a 0.001% outlier. Instead, speak for yourself. If for you 'falling in love' is a highly lust driven experience, that's fine. It may be much more 'emotional attachment' driven for others.

Tangentially - being an edge case doesn’t inherently dehumanise someone, edge cases do exist and we need to be able to discuss them without feeling we have to deny that to protect people.

Being an edge case is one of the most human things you can be. Our differences are what make us interesting!

I've read an anecdote somewhere that some phrenology doctor tried to find the most average man in a camp, by measuring everyone and then finding who is closest to all averages of measurements. Turned out that no one had all their measurements near average, everyone was off in one category or another. So, most of us are edge cases.

Sounds like early design on jet fighter seats. Found it!!! https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

Nobody is doing this. A person who struggles with ADHD, who has a diagnosed personality disorder such as schizophrenia, or who identifies as asexual is an outlier neurotypically speaking. Pointing this out is not dehumanizing.

The problem with the thrust of the argument the asexual person is making is they are equating their feelings of obsession as "half" of what makes love work. It's a false equivalence.

To me, the parent comment reads as "you're a freak who will not reproduce so your opinion doesn't matter".

Instead of engaging with the multitude of experiences of love and falling in love, the author discards the experiences by calling the person an outsider with nothing to contribute. That's quite unhelpful for the discussion.

That's a very ungenerous interpretation. But why take offense without knowing if the comment's recipient took offense?

I do not take offense on behalf of somebody else. Instead I find that the comment we are talking about goes against the guidelines of HN, and can't in good faith find a well meaning interpretation.

Guidelines are here to maintain a level-headed discourse, and I grew to expect a high level of empathy as well as thoughtful discussion here. One of the basic things needed for that is not devaluing other people's experiences, but instead sharing your own. Especially in such a highly subjective topic as love and falling in love. But also in general, I think that we would all benefit from accepting that others have different experiences, listen to them when they are shared with us, and share our own experiences expecting the same level of respect.

maybe anytime people use this argument they should provide an alternative.

so alternatively, how do you point out statistical insignificance, without calling someone a freak? That obviously not what literally happens here, but since you can read it like that, what would be the phrasing that YOU won't read as hostile?

Every one experience is anecdotal, and as such statistically insignificant. We get into trouble not when people tell their own statistically insignificant stories, but when someone tries to speak for others.

Generalizations, especially by someone who has no overview (e.g. doing some kind of a study on the topic) are not interesting. They are as if the photoreceptor cells in your eyes would talk to each other, while you look at the sky. "I see blue" most would say. "I see black", some would say. Then, some cell seeing blue could make the generalization that all are seeing blue except for some outliers. And you would remain blind to the fact that birds (appearing black) are flying in the sky. We need data points and personal experiences, not generalizations, to get a sharper picture.

Anecdotally, I teach first year students at a design university. They use generalizations all the time in language and in thinking about highly personal experiences (e.g. when asked to describe how they felt using one object compared to using another some would say "one feels" instead of "I feel"), thus pushing their realities onto others. It is as if generalizations are taught in schools as being more valuable, more valid, and personal experiences as anecdotal and invalid. Of course, the ability to deduct, to generalize is important for the process of reasoning. But it gets in the way when talking about what we actually feel and perceive.

You wrote 3 paragraphs and did not respond to my question. Did you think what you said is some mind blowing insight that no one have thought of or smt?

No need to be snarky and dismissive. I am sure, if you re-read the reply you will be able to understand how it relates to your question.

> Every one experience is anecdotal, and as such statistically insignificant

No, there are anecdotes from people with a majority background, that are useful to more people. If you really thought about this statement instead of forcing a talking point, it should have been obvious. The fact that we value minority's experience does not mean that there is not an inherent priority in most discussions to bring values to more people.

It's really hard to talk to you, since you imply I am forcing some talking point. I don't even know what talking point you mean. I am not from the US, never been to the US, but I can only assume it has something to do with your politics? I also don't appreciate language like "If you really thought about this statement" implying I don't think. That is not necessary. It is really out of place to talk so lovelessly in a thread about love. You can assume good faith on most of HN. No one is attacking you and you don't have to attack anyone. I hope some day you will be able to accept that.

My point was and still is, that anecdotes from people with majority background (as you put it) are not more or less useful to more or less people. When we talk about feeling we don't even know what 'majority' would be as it is really hard to get the real data; to talk about feelings honestly and faithfully. So it makes sense to let people talk first, to gather the actual experiences of real people, without assuming they have majority or minority point of view, and without assuming one of those is more or less valuable. After all, if an experience doesn't resonate with you, you can just let it be and move on.

If you go back to the comment that sparked this discussion, the issue is not that people were not allowed to "talk first".

Someone assessed that a particular anecdote was not reprentative of the majority. They could be wrong there, but instead of challenging that assessment, or "move on", some people jumped on the conclusion that the intention was hostile.

I think I understand you better now. However, there is no 'challenging that assessment', since the assessment itself is useless (adds nothing to the conversation), and could be rephrased as "Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man". But instead of being as inoffensive as this quote from The Big Lebowski, the comments reads as, at best, rude, and at worst, abusive. Since the tactic of making the experience of others appear invalid is the cornerstone of abuse. And we should do better than being abusive to each other.

The thread moved on and I'll end the conversation at this point.

> the assessment itself is useless (adds nothing to the conversation)

doesn't this contradict with "let everyone speak"? In a discussion, there are talking points, and then there are comments that contextualize them, such as pointing out whether something *sounds* like outlier. It can help provide heuristics when parsing large chunks of input.

Again that comment reads completely fine to me, and the person did not say they were offended.

>Please don't devalue and dehumanize your opponent and their contribution by calling them an edge case and a 0.001% outlier.

Why devalue or dehumanize?

I tend to view "being outlier" as something positive

Even when someone argues that your opinion is less valid since you are an outlier? Like (for my eyes and ears) the parent comment does?

I believe s/he wanted just to remind or make him/her aware, not devalue him/her.

I know plenty of people who are demi-sexual, in which the love comes first and the sex perhaps later. And for that matter ace folks do have children too.

Infatuation?

That's just obsession and has nothing to do with your status as asexual or not. Everyone is prone to obsessive feelings but they're not companions of love.

I think you're actually the one that's pushing a semantics game here as in societies which are broadly liberal (let's say most Western cultures for sake of argument), sex is the hook that gets you to love. You generally don't start with love and then lust later.

I don't think my experience is at all uncommon among women.

It's extremely common for me that I will love someone first for who he is and only develop lustful feelings later.

Perhaps men routinely begin with lust. Perhaps women do too. But starting with love and lusting later is also common.

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